


And Bob's Your Uncle

by alicat54c



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hale fire, bobby finstock is related to the hales, tag is because it's teen wolf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 04:53:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10482501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicat54c/pseuds/alicat54c
Summary: Bobby Finstock hears that his estranged brother is killed in a house fire ( but that can't be right, he was a fire fighter for years-), so he waits for when his missing niece and nephew come home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Bobby Finstock is related to the Hale family
> 
> based off this post: https://alicat54c.tumblr.com/post/158933768628/look-at-season-1-derek-with-his-crazy-eyes-and-his

Bobby Finstock never forgave his brother for eloping with that Talia woman he met during his planned ‘cross country hiking’ gap year. It wasn’t because he had any sort of opinion against said woman in question, but his older brother was meant to go off to medical school and become a surgeon, not a back woodsman in Bumble-nowhere California.

There were other complications Bobby wasn’t privy to, other than the floor shaking arguments he heard his mother conduct with his brother over the phone while he studied for his high school finals before graduation.

Without his perfect brother diverting the limelight of several expectant generations of Finstocks, well, at least Bobby realized surgeon wasn’t for him and switched to exercise sciences before finishing his degree. His parents and grandparents were mildly disappointed, but supposed that if that was the best that Bobby could do... He grit his teeth all through his graduation ceremony.

Bobby hadn’t thought about his estranged brother in years. He was on track to be the first response care provider to the football team of a very prestigious university when the letter summoning him to a will reading knocked him flat into his office desk chair.

He tried to call his mother, but she refused to even open up the envelope that was sent to her as well. So, with a heart full of needles, Bobby teleconferenced with the Hale’s lawyers.

They said it was a fire.

They said it was an accident.

But Bobby was there when his older brother volunteered for five years with the fire department, and helped save that basket of puppies the time the animal shelter caught on fire. He would have known how to get out of a burning house, or at least have done more than huddle in the basement, which the burnt corpses left behind in the ashes indicated.

His parents still refused to hear another word on the issue, even when Bobby invited them to the funeral. Bobby stood in he back of the crowd, which held what looked like half the tiny town. He heard the names listed- he had had nieces, nephews, cousins through marriage- so so many names.

When he heard that two had escaped the fire unscathed, Bobby, who had already cashed in the last of his sick days, called his university to beg for more time to wrestle custody of them from the state. However, football season was starting soon, and if he couldn’t handle the team, then they would find someone else who could, and... By the time the season was done, Derek and Laura Hale had vanished.

Bobby sat in his office surrounded by cold plastic trophies and file cabinets full of athlete’s names. The lawyers had sent along some personal effects that had been found in a lock box with his brother’s name. Inside were photo albums Bobby remembered him putting together for a family tree project. He ran his hands over the splotches of glitter splashed across the cover, his own childish contributions. The pages in the back, previously left empty, were full of sharp toothed smiling faces, Bobby only recognized from police reports.

His hands felt cold, despite the burning in the back of his throat.

The Finstock clan reacted as well as can be expected, mainly exactly how Bobby expected, when they found out he quit his job to teach at a high school. Not even a private high school either; but Beacon Hills had its own quaint charm (and an opening with two of its core staff members having been burnt alive).

To compensate for the abrupt radio silence from his family, Bobby visited Peter Hale. All of once. He visited Peter Hale all of once, and had to excuse himself from the room as the nurse explained his extensive burns and vegetative state. Bobby worked with the wonders of keeping an able body able, instead of the horrors of illness for a reason. He meant to go back. He meant to. One day.

But.

But his brother had been a fire fighter, and died curled up in the basement of his home, and the insurance agent had ruled the ‘unfortunate incident’ an accident. Electrical fire, they had said.

And that was all they said. No mention of the two missing Hale heirs (his niece would have just barely been eighteen, and his nephew (he had his grandmother’s eyes, and she still refused to even look at his pictures) would have been even younger).

They were just kids. They didn’t have anyone. They must be so scared.

Bobby ran a hand over his face, staring at the white walls of his considerably downsized apartment. He would get a house. He would get a house with two- three, he firmly growled, so he could help his brother in law too when he woke up- and he would wait.

If there was one thing he was sure of, it was once a Finstock always a Finstock, and those kids would need family when they came back home.

Then he would tell them all the embarrassing stories about his older brother that he should have been there to tell them as children. And he- he would listen as they told him about the brother he had turned into a stranger, and-

Bobby took a shuddering breath, and pressed his hand against his face.

He would wait.


End file.
